I, Fatty Read online

  Praise for I, Fatty

  "The 'memoir' has about it a convincingly addled tone, sometimes rambling, rarely self-pitying, often humorous, full of 1920s showbiz jargon and evoking plenty of empathy for Arbuckle...In Stahl, the silent star Arbuckle could not have hoped for a more well-equipped mouthpiece."—Atlanta Journal Constitution

  "I, Fatty is all voice, and that voice—wisecracking, shrewd, bawdy, self-deprecating, and rueful—is a tour de force."—Newsday

  "This is a writer who knows how to give voice to despair. He also reveals a keen eye for the details of early Hollywood, with everyone from Buster Keaton and Mack Sennett to Mabel Norman and Charlie Chaplin making appearances...Stahl has masterfully re-imagined an American tragedy that will seduce you and break your heart all over again."—Rocky Mountain News

  "Jerry Stahl crawls inside the vilified fat man's head and emerges with a masterpiece. 1, Fatty is a fine, fine piece of work—the definitive new word on an important figure in film history."—Anthony Bourdain, author of Kitchen Confidential and A Cooks Tour

  "An imaginary memoir written in the slangy lingo of an early Hollywood hep-cat... One part morality tale, one part frisky romp through the decadent years of nascent Hollywood."—San Francisco Chronicle

  "Jerry Stahl...is a better-than-Burroughs virtuoso when it comes to depicting every paranoid high and cold-kicking torment obtainable from the street and the medicine chest."—New Yorker

  "Though Stahl revels in Fatty's overindulgences and generally vile behavior, he also manages to make the ol' buffoon sympathetic—especially during the trial that ultimately found Arbuckle not guilty but still destroyed his career." —Maxim (Book of the Month; five stars)

  "Finally, the true skinny on Fatty. Jerry Stahl brilliantly gives life, voice, truth, and respect to Roscoe Arbuckle, redeeming the unjustly tarnished memory of a wildly great talent and a great wild man."—Johnny Depp

  "[A] compelling rags-to-riches-to-nearly-rags tale."—Oregonian

  "Jerry Stahl tells Arbuckle's story as nimbly as that graceful fat man took a pratfall. I, Fatty joins the shelf of Hollywood tragedies alongside The Day of the Locust "—Robert Sklar, author of Movie-Made America

  "Fascinating...I, Fatty may overflow with insider gossip and speculation on the often sordid affairs of the young movie industry's biggest stars, but it also reveals how exciting it was to be an actor or director in Hollywood's formative years. As channeled through Stahl, Arbuckle's memory is remarkably lucid, and his sense of pre- and post-gallows humor remains wonderfully intact." —Chicago Sun-Times

  "A wisecracking, sepia-toned novelization of the chemical highs and legal lows of silent-film-era star Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle and the more famous Hollywood scandal that undid him."—Los Angeles Times

  "Witty, compassionate, occasionally cynical, always entertaining, I, Fatty is a triumph of ventriloquism, and an unexpectedly moving examination into our desperate need to create and then tear down our heroes."—JT LeRoy, author of Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things

  "Stahl's first-person narrative gets inside his subject's head, while sticking close to the facts. Arbuckle gains readers' sympathy as the wounded fat kid who felt no love from his father. He is also a funny storyteller and, like many good autobiographers, occasionally self-aggrandizing...[A] complex and moving portrait."—Time Out New York

  "[Stahl is] just the man to tell the Arbuckle tale...This is a chatty, zoom-fast, often very funny book, written in the rueful, oddly fastidious voice of a late-life Arbuckle."—Boston Herald

  "Poignant...Through Arbuckle's bemused, raunchy voice, [Stahl] draws a sympathetic portrait of a keen, wounded actor in a tale replete with insightful portraits of American vaudeville and silent film...An illuminating story about actors, studios, and audiences."—Kirkus Reviews

  "From laughter in the dark, the shame of the species, and the cheap moth-eaten fabric of a ruined life, Jerry Stahl has woven a morality tale from which there is no escape."—Nick Tosches, author of In the Hand of Dante and Dino

  "Stahl's deep dedication to the whacked-out and marginalized helps him inhabit Arbuckle's character sharply and convincingly."—Publishers Weekly

  "Entertaining and surprisingly poignant...an utterly believable yarn that has as

  Reporter

  I, FATTY

  a novel

  JERRY STAHL

  BLOOMSBURY

  This is a work of fiction. The lives of the characters in this book are matters of historical record. What went on in their heads and came out of their mouths is pure speculation on the part of the author.

  Copyright © 2004 by Jerry Stahl

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Publishing, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, New York and London Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

  All papers used by Bloomsbury Publishing are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Stahl, Jerry.

  I, Fatty : a novel /Jerry Stahl.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58234-582-6

  1. Arbuckle, Roscoe, 1887-1933—Fiction. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—Fiction. 3. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. 4. Motion picture industry—Fiction. 5. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. 6. Trials (Murder)—Fiction. 7. Comedians—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.T3125I15 2004

  813'.54—dc22

  2003028011

  First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Publishing in 2004

  This paperback edition published in 2005

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Polmont, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  Printed in the United States of America

  by Quebecor World Fairfield

  For Stella Jane Stahl and Chris Calhoun

  There is nothing funnier than unhappiness.

  —Samuel Beckett

  Contents

  Introduction

  PART 1

  PART 2

  PART 3

  PART 4

  PART 5

  PART 6

  PART 7

  Bibliography

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  Introduction

  I WAS ONCE picked up by the police on Fatty Arbuckle's front lawn. Of course, by then Fatty—who preferred to be called Roscoe—had moved on. Arbuckle died in 1933. And this was the mid-eighties, before the dawn of the Crack Era. Street dealers dotted that no-longer-upscale strip of Adams Boulevard, near downtown Los Angeles, flagging down white kids in cars to sell them loads, a potent combo of Doredin and Codeine 4. Dors-'n'- 4s offered a slow-motion rush that lasted half an hour, with a residual opiate buzz that kept you scratching your nose and not moving your bowels for days at a time. Looking to deeply wound legions of much-loathed punks—core consumers for the narcotic combo described above—a cabal of LAPD, DEA, and two mysterious men named Leon from Compton made Doredins disappear, forcing an entire community to jump to junk.

  Fatty's pad, by the time your author landed facedown in front of it, had already been converted to a stately outpost of Christ called Amat House. Amat served as home base for a batch of Vincentian priests, a sect devoted to chaste men doing charitable works. These, apparently, did not include rushing out to aid drug-crazed strangers in moments of distress—though I
do recall a couple of startled white faces peering from a pushed-aside curtain as an officer bade me lie "lips down" on the sidewalk. I was not, technically, on the Catholic brothers' lawn; my face was pressed between the prongs of the metal fence that surrounded their grass. Still, I remember savoring the dank, naturey smell of steer manure, pretending that I was on a farm, napping with my face in the dirt, the way farmers do.

  All of which would mean absolutely nothing if not for the fact that three-quarters of a century earlier, in 1916, a fetus-faced five-foot-seven, 3 75-pound millionaire was shooting heroin and contemplating his ruin in the very chamber from which the strange white faces stared down at my own. Who knows but that Arbuckle, nodding in some bygone era, closed his eyes and heard the cries of drug abusers three generations unconceived stumbling down the sidewalk of the house he occupied?

  At the time of his needle ride, 29-year-old Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was more popular than Charlie Chaplin. And, on that particular August day, at the screaming height of World War I, in an upscale corner of the cow town packed with transplanted White Trash, first-generation Euro-escape artists, marginal theatrical types, and native Mexicans, the colossal, nodding Arbuckle could claim to be the most loved movie star waddling the earth—if not the most clean-living.

  Hooked by an incompetent intern who botched a boil-lancing procedure and prescribed heroin to ease the agony, Arbuckle was left with an on-again, off-again habit on top of his already rampant alcoholism. Attending to his special "needs" was a Japanese manservant named Okie, a combination valet, handyman, and gofer whose status in Arbuckle's life presages the "personal assistant," now a virtual prerequisite for Hollywood status holders.

  Okie stuck with his master through three marriages, an arrest for murder and rape, three trials, and an overnight fall from massive stardom to object of mass hate—a spiral that stripped him of millions and left him in financial ruin. It was the financial ruin that got Okie worried.

  As rumor has it, Okie worked for free when Arbuckle lost his fortune due to legal bills. He stayed on, earning nothing, in what many of Arbuckle's friends considered an act of supreme employee devotion. The darker truth is that Okie—real name Tomokita Ito—knew he had nowhere to go. Who would hire a manservant whose last man was a fat rapist and sex murderer? It behooved the cagey valet to have a plan B—which he did. If you so choose, you're about to read it.

  From the time of his employer's first surgical mishap—when pain drove Fatty the actor to become Fatty the addict—Okie controlled the drugs. He knew how much to dispense, and when to stop dispensing it. But at the end, when it was clear the man whose fate determined his own was never going to win back more than a sliver of his former status—or earning power—Okie took matters into his own hands. In a series of "no story, no medicine" sessions, the determined servant withheld narcotics to his employer until, facing the throes of withdrawal, the big man told his story. Bit by tragicomic bit.

  Okie'd boosted one of those newfangled Dictaphones from the back of Adolph Zukor's Pierce-Arrow and learned how to use it. They scheduled sessions wherein Arbuckle would dredge up his life as best he could, and when he began sweating too badly to focus, Okie would give him his shot.

  Roscoe's last wife, Addie McPhail, knew that her husband was overworked. Sustaining a career was hard enough, but the pressure of staging a comeback was crushing. Sometimes Roscoe's leg hurt so badly he could not get off the divan without an injection. Happily—for us—Addie never questioned his occasional disappearances to his "study" with Okie in tow. Roscoe always returned chatty and affectionate, if a little glassy-eyed.

  The apocryphal version of I, Fatty is that Arbuckle finished spilling his proverbial beans—eyes on Okie's fingers around that loaded syringe as he poured his life out—on the very day, maybe at the very minute, he expired. (The way the book landed in my hands is a saga in itself and would require another tome.) Suffice it to say, the reality of how the manuscript came to exist at all can never be known for certain. As to the truth of the document you're about to read, the jury's out on that, too.

  Not that a jury's version of reality has much to do with anything. One lesson Roscoe learned—the way one does after surviving three murder trials, worldwide vilification, jail, and pie fights—is that what people are willing to believe about a man, and what a man believes about himself, tend to be wildly divergent enterprises.

  Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle stood out as the O.J. of his day. The difference—aside from niggling matters of race, guilt, and innocence—is that, for his "crimes," not only was Roscoe hounded from the top of the Hollywood food chain to the bottom, but the furor over his alleged behavior left Hollywood itself nearly hounded out of existence, victim of a morally indignant, rabidly fascinated, tabloid-fed public.

  Of course, that very public's appetite for the sordid details of Arbuckle's "crime" gave rise to an entire industry of celebrity-obsessed, and celeb-baiting, journalism that persists to this day. As do the church-based fundamentalist moralizers who blamed Fatty for all the family-threatening ills of a society they believed to be straying from right-living into moral decay. Bad enough the millionaire butterball was a degenerate perv—he worked for jews! And Jews, as every fundamentalist knows, want nothing better than to corrupt the heart of the heartland.

  The tale of Arbuckle's rise, fall, and double-edged redemption is here filtered through the sometimes bilious, sometimes anguished, oddly lighthearted soul of the man himself. As narrator—and male lead—Roscoe stands out as funny as he is tormented. A simple Kafka in a fat-suit. He was massively candid, given the circumstances. Which were pretty extreme. But who knows?

  As the somewhat portly Dr. Johnson liked to remind his admirers, "Seldom any splendid story is wholly true."

  PART 1

  Daddy Was a Custer Man

  DADDY REFERRED to my mother's reproductive organs as "her little flower."

  In my earliest baby-boy memories, the man's either looming and glum—not drunk enough—or bug-eyed and stubbly after a three-day bender, so liquored up he tilts when he leans down to snatch me off the burlap rags my brothers and sisters piled on the floor of our Kansas shack and called our "sleepy blankets." I'd blink awake in the air, shaking cold, my face so close to Daddy's the rye fumes burned my eyeballs. He'd rattle me till my teeth clacked, then start ranting in that high, Hoosier whine he only got when he was blotto and wanted to hurt something.

  "You broke her little flower, pig boy!"

  —WHACK!—

  "Sixteen pounds of baby? That's just wrong!"

  —SLAP PUNCH SLAP—

  If, against my better judgment, I'd speak up—"Ouch, Daddy, please . . . I'm sorry!"—it only made him more furious. He'd drop me outright—one blessing of fat, it's good padding—and strike a pose like John L. Sullivan, whom he liked to think he resembled.

  "I'll show you sorry, jumbo! You broke Mama's little flower squeezing your sideshow keister out of her . . . If you'd never been born, she wouldn't have gotten sick!"

  That was Daddy. Willie Arbuckle. Born in Indiana, died in Kansas, California, Mexico, and anywhere else he tried his luck. In the magazines, I always called him a "gentleman farmer." The real article was a professional boozehound, gifted at going belly up in five languages. He married a church-going lovely, beat her senseless, then embarked on a life of leaving for glory and crawling home broke.

  Daddy liked to say that his fondest wish was to have "gone with Custer." The general had perished four years before Dad moved to Smith Center—which, in 1880, was the geographical center of the continental United States. "The boys in the Seventh U.S. Cavalry found glory at the hands of savages—and all I've ever done is pass out in Kansas"

  Just a Big Little Boy

  I was born three days ahead of schedule—always eager to get to the next date—so Mama had to make do without a midwife. When Daddy got word, he barreled in from the fields, took in my girth and my mortally exhausted mother, and let out a yowl. According to my sister Norah, who was bringi
ng in boiled sheets, Daddy threw Mama's Bible against the wall and cursed. "Goddamm it, Dee, that can't be mine. It's got the haunches of a hog!"

  He hated me on sight. Which does something to a boy. Knowing I caused so much distress for my mother and father by just being me made me want to eat. The more I ate, the more Daddy went Hun on me for how fat and stupid I was. I topped 100 at 5. When my mother died, Daddy told me I killed her. The old man got whirly drunk, belt-whipped me, and locked me in a steamer trunk for a week. I was 12. He kept screaming that after I was born, my mother "stopped being a wife." I had ruined her womanhood.

  Ladies and their little flowers pretty much scared me from then on. Because you could break them without knowing it. Or somebody could say you did.

  "Jesus didn't need a penis!" Mama liked to remind me. For as long as I can remember, she would quote the Bible to show me that sex was wrong. As I grew older, it seemed worse than wrong. It seemed impossible. After I married and suffered a droopy honeymoon, a doctor in Los Angeles said that my girth had left me with a weakened nuptial muscle. "Heft problems. Nothing to be ashamed of," he explained. "Eat more blood-meats."